Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

;)”

  *

  The late Professor Long dreamt when the bullet dashed through his brain. The dream started the moment the bullet touched the skin of his temple, and ended the moment it burst out the other side of his skull.

  It didn’t end then, it ended the moment after. There was one additional moment. Wait—

  Dreams never begin. Something else becomes a dream a piece at a time, rapidly but not instantly, until it’s all dream. Until enough of it is dream, no, no, until it begins to move the way a dream moves, instead of in the way waking thoughts move. Dreams only end when the dreamer wakes up, so dreams don’t actually end, not of themselves, but the dreamer leaves them. They get interrupted and they stay interrupted until I sleep again and that flowing, gently-insistent wobble takes over. What is really interrupted, the dream, or my idea of what the dream is? All throughout the dream I am constantly understanding, which is one of the ways I know I am not in waking life, because in waking life I never understand except when I recognize a misunderstanding.

  That question doesn’t point anywhere interesting looking from here. The more attractive question now is this: what happens to the dream if the dreamer is blown out from under the dream?

  In the late Professor Long’s final dream, the dream triggered by the bullet as it made its lethal dash through his brain, he is back home. He isn’t back home, he’s in a neverending house he’s never seen before, and which has been retroactively designated his “childhood home”—who by?—He had no such thing, he was raised in a series of California apartments and his parents moved many times—and now it is “his own” family home. He’s a lifelong childless bachelor. This is his family home. What is the inconsistency?

  It doesn’t feel like coming home. It’s like coming home to find everything disappointingly altered and disagreeing with the memory. Memories he can’t account for and that he can’t differentiate from his dream understanding of everything. The room is tall, has no windows, with skylights. The walls are painted a dark, mottled red. Black columns in each corner, the floor is a chessboard, ferns and rubber plants in huge pots wave in air conditioning, the furniture is uncomfortable straightbacked Victorian stuff, burgundy upholstered sofa, a slouching pouf. What’s this got to do with animal money? This doesn’t have anything to do with animal money. It has everything to do with animal money. I don’t know how it does, but I am certain that it does. Qualities, is what all these are. I go up to the wall nearest me. There are mirrors, small hand mirrors, mounted to the wall in a random archipelago. All the mirrors in the house are small and mounted in scatters like this; you never can manage to see your whole face at once, not even in the bathroom.

  I’m having hallucinations. I’m not having hallucinations—the house is haunted. There are rooms that aren’t safe, that will drive me insane if I go into them, inducing a special insanity forever, not forever, only for as long as I stay in those rooms, but what happens once will happen again. I can never be sure, after that; I won’t have the chance, I won’t, once insane in that way, want to leave those rooms. There are trapped rooms. The traps move around, so there aren’t trapped rooms there are roving room traps. I have to watch for the tell. I don’t know what it would be. Most often it’s the image of an animal. A coiling white snakelike dog in a painting, there before the feet of the gathered hunters and their horses, their bags heavy with game, heads and tails protruding from sacks, bright plumage like gleaming gems in the dark casket of the painting. The dog’s eyes are like blisters, glistening and black; it snarls down at the earth with lips faintly tinged with pink, baring yellow fangs, arching its back. Don’t go in there. Someone is talking to me. A woman from the village, speaking in her flat, nasal, quotidian voice as she walks quickly across the room behind him:

  “They always get us in here with these high anxiety ____s, but it ain’t hard to talk them down to our level and they know there’s nothing we can do about them. You want to try to get this done in the next hour and a half.”

  I couldn’t make out that one word. She seems to be talking cavalierly about the householders, and about “us.”

  Some time in the past, somebody told me something about the two forces, meaning two forces at work here, and how you have to balance the two forces to keep from coming to the bad ending. No one has ever told me anything about this. I have a pamphlet, like a Chick tract. The cover image, long and narrow, shows a drawing of a grave with a rounded headstone and a caption underneath it that reads IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU, and inside there are images of funerals and coffins and graves, and cartoon images of me suffering.

  I showed them!

  The safe room has a big mirror in it. The monster can’t go into a place where it has seen itself feed: the monster has a charred-looking living second face burned into its chest, which vacuously gnaws the flesh around it and drinks the blood that trickles out, its own blood. I’ve never seen this monster. There may be more than one. It’s possible to see through the house without leaving the room by looking mirror to mirror. I seek out a private one, that is, a mirror I can peek into without being noticed.

  I see Assiyeh wiping steam off the mirror, water spilling from her hair. Not this mirror, another mirror, looking over her bare shoulder. She turns to me, away from the mirror and stands facing me through the wall. Her waist is narrow, very narrow, it tapers, set into wide hips, wide but lean. Seen from the front, she looks like a guitar. Seen from the front, she looks like a centaur. She turned, but not to me. She is drying her hair, pressing the water out against her skull into the towel wrapped around her hand. Each press draws the skin tight across her face, pulls her mouth back a little, and she is looking up toward the ceiling, toward the corner of the room, the wall not the ceiling, not at anything, vacancy. She’s not vacant, the field of vision ... is not vacant, what vacancy, for who, for whom?

  He is turning into mist and smoke—he can’t tell her anything. She can’t hear him. He keeps on asking one question after another and there’s no sound, no feeling of breath or diaphragm or jaws, just a static outline that can only move as a single piece like a slide projection, and he doesn’t want to ask questions, he wants to explain something but it’s difficult now to know what that is, he might need to explain it to himself first, but what comes out of him, the words, are all hapless questions, who am I where am I what am I, that never can be really answered. She is rubbing the towel over her head with both hands. A black hole is descending silently toward him.

  *

  Well? Go on.

  Well ... you see, they are her parents; they are not mischievous folkloric impostor spirits having a laugh at her expense. It’s not that they aren’t like themselves. Um. They are and they aren’t. These ghosts have none of the mischievous force of life; they are like amplified versions of imposing family portraits, not brought to life, but acting anyway as lifeless imperial effigies. When death cuts the thongs, the various souls all go their own ways.

  Now.

  ... Assiyeh has determined ... no, she thinks ... that the more vital spirits of her parents are likely to be still circulating in the Earth’s atmosphere. Under constant acceleration they zoom faster and faster until they zoom clear of the planet. ... To ... to catch them ... Not just any matter can decelerate and snare a spirit; some matter is tackier, more woolly, sometimes in its essence and sometimes accidentally. When a spirit is trapped ... she thinks ... she speculates ... it may circulate at high speed throughout all the adjoining matter. ... So the ghost may be likened to a high frequency current that runs through a significant proportion of the matter of the Earth, with ... the scene of its death, or whatever place it haunts, acting as a kind of capacitor or booster. Like a relay. The circuit is tapped by applying to it the same fields Assiyeh has been using in her experiments to produce absolute rest. She can slow the spirits until they become visible and ... collect in one place, translating them from the metaphorical electric condition to a self-contained and self-motivated individual circuit. ... In short, a person.

&
nbsp; Assiyeh needs to ground her field in telluric forces. She goes to a hotel in the mountains that features, as one of its attractions, rooms with transparent floors built directly over gaping mine shafts. Getting out of bed, you swing your feet down still half asleep and then leap back in terror at the abyss telescoping beneath you. Realizing that the bed is resting on top of the pit as well gives you a weird feeling. A combination of the comfort and security of a cozy bed, and panic terror.

  Now, Assiyeh chose this hotel because of these shafts. They allow her to conjure the majestic ghosts of the underworld with all their awesome decorum. Focussing her collectors on the Saturn beam, Assiyeh is able to recouple her link to the statelier ghosts of her parents, who become dimly visible onscreen, thanks to the camera Assiyeh concealed in the tomb. ... She has a remote camera there, and is watching the inside of the mausoleum, looking at her parents’ ghosts on TV. Now she fires up her Rest Generator. ... It runs off a power plant she parked right outside the room, in a big truck, cables run through the window.

  ... Assiyeh sifts the air currents through the skylight with an array of amber combs, trying to gather enough parental particles for a reconstitution. After forty minutes, she materializes an arm of bright red smoke that ricochets around the room in complete silence, then dissolves again.

  ... For a minute fifty-one seconds Assiyeh watches the workings of an invisible face pressed into the bedclothes.

  After four hours, Assiyeh resignedly shuts down her equipment. The sun is up, the morning is bright. Another failure. Assiyeh walks out into the empty corridor—it’s the off season, and she is virtually the hotel’s only customer—and heads for the patio, which overlooks a spacious valley and tall mountains clear and limpid on the far side.

  The patio is deserted. She sits at a table and reviews her notes, without noticing the sky’s blue brilliance or so much as glancing at the three or four enormous clouds floating in it. Only when a gust of wind bounds up out of the calm and flips a page from under her eyes, and she lunges to pin it down with her palm, does she happen to lift her eyes to the sky. Directly before her, high over the valley, a single cloud shines, a confection of impossibly pure light, its flank is like a snow-covered mountain slope and someone is descending it in little bounds. Assiyeh rises to her feet staring at something that nods and flashes as it strides down the cloud, pale, translucent and very far away, not as white as the cloud, bulbous, and something on its surface is very reflective, catching sunlight it winks painful darts of light into her eyes. It undulates aside as if it were avoiding some obstacle, and Assiyeh sees a flourish of what looks like pink taffeta—it resembles the central figure in Bokelman’s Casino.

  The thing turns and it looks nothing like the central figure in Bokelman’s Casino, it looks like something from a coral reef, a partially transparent globular ambling slug or worm nodding impressively and picking its footing like a mincing fat man. The legs are pliable, rounded cones. The body has a floating tissue mantle that undulates, leans, pools, and oozes like a weak flame.

  Down the side of the cloud it walks, finally vanishing behind one of its folds. Assiyeh watches the cloud until it disappears over the horizon, and meanwhile the remaining Professor Long is returning to her office, which is situated in one corner of the botanical garden behind the imposing cream-colored gateau-like cube that houses the Department of Botany. The Department and the garden are not on the main campus of Achrizoguayla University, but occupy a site not far from the location of the original school, close to the center of San Toribio. To reach this office of hers, she must make her way through a knee-high maze of thin, dusty white lanes pivoting among shrubs and exotic plants with Latin tags. The plants are organized in some technical way, so that the distinctively Chinese specimens are mixed in with everything else. She visited these expatriate and transplant plants with reluctance because she felt in their presence a depressing obligation to exert her imagination in a fizzling effort to touch home again through them. The plants themselves seemed to resent her, and chide her as she turned away in confusion. More than once, though, she laughed, because she had discovered too late that the tree or shrub she had been pouring attention into like a crystal ball was actually not Chinese—she’d misread the label, or attributed the label on one plant to another by mistake. Relief washing over her then, she would laugh. She knew nothing about plants; she could just about distinguish pine trees, although they were often cedars. However, when Professor Cladodi, the department chair, a petite, wildly curvy, copper-colored woman of about her own age, showed her personally to her new office, she was delighted to find it in the frondy shadiness of the garden. Nearby, there was a small greenhouse where butterflies were cultivated, and she liked the oddly sour musky odor of the bare soil. There were many fragrant flowers besides, and a peppery smell of leaves baking in the sun, all very pleasant. She liked to take breaks in the garden, and to press her hands against the trunks of the big trees.

  “It’s drinking,” she would think.

  Or, “It’s asleep.”

  Or, “This one has suffered.”

  Or, “It’s concentrating.”

  Her office is less satisfactory than the garden; an octagonal wooden pavilion roughly six meters across opposite angles, rising on a high stone foundation. All the paint is long gone, if there had ever been paint; the exposed wood is grey, bone dry, and full of splinters. It has an overhanging pyramidal roof and a single door; the rest of it is shutters, a fact that the remaining Professor Long would not accept until she had circumnavigated the building three times. The entire outer skin is nothing but a concatenation of louvered shutters. When they are all open, the pavilion is like a Moroccan tin lamp with the punched tabs bent outward. Within, there is, rising from the region of the center of the floor, an octagonal plug of solid stone about four feet high, which might have been a font or the pillar support for a wooden podium or perhaps a wooden counter, since removed or never installed. Having placed on it a requisitioned drawing board, the remaining Professor Long uses this plug as a desk. The flat upper surface of the plug is high enough off the ground that she has to perch on top of a stool to use it, with her feet swinging. The pavilion had been left to rot for years; the refurbishments are effective but strange. There are discordantly blonde bits of lumber patching openings, reinforcing joints, and so on. For a light source, they installed a chandelier so enormous that the first Professor Long finds herself virtually among its dangling baubles when she sits at her stone plug. She has to hunch down to fit under it, and even then some of the glass ornaments lie along her shoulders. In the evenings, returning to the pavilion after a stroll in the garden, it looks like a furnace inside a beehive, sending brilliant shafts of light out through the slats of the shutters.

  There’s a small cabinet built into a post inside the pavilion, which has to serve in lieu of desk drawers. Now she goes to it and pulls out the congratulatory box of fancy cigars her old friend Dai-Mei sent her. It seems wrong to smoke them now, although she is not exactly in mourning, but on the other hand she feels a nagging, not particularly intelligent obligation to justify the trouble and expense Dai-Mei must have gone through to arrange for their delivery. As long as she has them, she will also have the duty to smoke them, so she would rather smoke them now and get it over with. Fortunately, there are only five. But they are very big cigars. Green ones. At least, the wrapper is green. Inside, brown as any. She had always liked cigars, even very large ones; the difficulty lay in her being required to report back truthfully on the quality of these very fancy cigars, and to give her friend the impression, truthful or not, that she found them at least adequately delicious. They actually were delicious, but having to draft a detailed report of their special delicacy was pesky. Now she withdraws one of the cigars, which is wrapped in paper, cuts off the end with a pair of shears and takes it outside to light it.

  Sitting outside in the gathering dusk of Achrizoguayla, she can hear music from over the wall. There are what might be luxury apartments or per
haps hotels on the far side, and it’s easy to look over into the swimming pools far below, where petite, wildly curvy women languidly elongate and then pivot to become glistening points, the decelerated kicking feet wavering vaguely beneath. Each puff she takes is different. The first is disgusting. The next one shocking. The third smooth and bitter. The fourth is buttery and thinly sweet. Scalp tight and skin clammy, she feels her interior regions sink beneath the purely mechanical calm of the nicotine. The palaces rise up around her in fancy, the mountains and the gardens. She leaves the cigar on the stone bench to go out on its own, and goes down to the butterfly greenhouse, which looks spectral and still and almost false, like a diorama. Further down, down the lanes in the shade in the dark, to the bottom of the park where the path loops around at the base of the wall and from time to time you can hear the calling of the peacocks from somewhere nearby. Around her in the dark a fantasy homeland lifts. What she imagines are big buildings shaped like fat torpedoes, clustered together and ornamented with thick lines and bulbs or baubles, like gingerbread men, all blue with indigo shadows in dusk, a magic place that she belongs to, but that belongs to nobody, just to itself, a place she’s never been but that’s always with her in as many different shapes and looks as moments of her looking. She ascends the path up to the top of the slope. Off to her right is the Botany Department, and then the garden stretching around in front of it, and then the long facade of a palatial old building currently being renovated for student housing. Three stories, a flat facade with an imposing entrance on one side, and many ground-level French doors on the side facing the Botany Department. Out of sight, and beyond, is one of the two buildings belonging to the Auxiliary Economics Institute. Off to her left, standing opposite the future student housing across a broad gravel drive with a distant gate to the street, is a converted manor house now belonging to the Faculty of Applied Sciences. Thick torpedoes, waving forests of stone spires, a pterodactyl and naked wildly curvy rider glide under the moon, and she suddenly is paralyzed, her whole body inexplicable abrupt rigid with something like electric current petrifying her all because she saw Assiyeh’s face in the window up there, framed like an image in a postage stamp, looking casually out toward the panoply of San Toribio, blinking, apparently not noticing the remaining Professor Long, and without a light, but her face and her fingertips in the dark window of the converted manor house now belonging to the Faculty of Applied Sciences.